Buchanan points to the unfair advantages that China has created by devaluating and keeping its currency cheap, thereby favoring and protecting its industry, and growing a large surplus with which it can acquire US assets. Is the free trade response to this that it doesn’t matter?

Even as he points to what looks like serious issues involving foreign states, Buchanan leaves unaddressed not only the perils of protectionism, but also the ways in which government actions and policies at home – favoring consumption over savings, bubble creating, heavy government borrowing – have fostered the problem that he decries.